A Black Hawk Chopper
This is some of what we did on this radio program. The right-wing dismantling of the government continues, and the MAGA-ites are looking for victims. Some of them are too stupid to realize that in the end they're some of Trump's victims. The price of eggs is rising. We talked about the terrible attempt to scapegoat a transgendered helicopter pilot, who surprised the right-wing detractors by showing that she had not died in a plane crash, and R. Paul talked about Marianne Faithfull who passed away this past week. I'm hoping to update this Web page, so it might be worth coming back to seek that update.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday February 12, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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There was a double plane crash in Washington, D.C. Wednesday night an army Black Hawk chopper and a Bombardier CRJ700 jet passenger plane collided and crashed into the Potomac River, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. Trump seized the opportunity to make a televised speech blaming former president Biden and D.E.I. which stands for Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trump's followers picked this up. A person with the handle FakeGayPolitics on X was cited in the Daily News as one of the first to mention the name of a transgendered pilot. A day later he wrote, I shared some news, as did thousands of others, from a source that appears to have ended up not being correct. I will be deleting it. Apologies to all those involved.
Meanwhile an early poster of a name of a real pilot was a twitter user named Nyto Mwangi who wrote, Meet Jo Ellis, The transgender Chief Warrant Officer 2, a UH-60 Black Hawk pilot who crashed the military helicopter, taking 66 lives with her after colliding with an American Airlines! I wondered why President Trump was blaming DEI, but I knew he had briefed on something....
Others are citing a Twitter/X user with the handle FinalTelegraph as an early person to say that the pilot of the chopper was transgendered. That person has apparently also taken down their post.
But Jo Ellis who is a transgender Black Hawk pilot with the Virginia Army National Guard posted what some describe as a proof of life
video on Friday to counter the lies about her. She started out saying, Interesting morning,
she continued, I understand some people have associated me with the crash in D.C. and that is false,
she then said, It is insulting to the families to try to tie this to some kind of political agenda. They don't deserve that. I don't deserve this. And I hope you all know that I am alive and well and this should be sufficient for you all to end all the rumors.
Chief Warrant Officer Ellis had posted about Gender Dysphoria and depression the day before the accident and a number of the MAGA-ites were saying that she'd committed suicide by crashing the chopper into the plane. All it took was Trump giving them a hint, mentioning D.E.I. as a cause and they took off and ended up focusing on someone to scapegoat. This is how things are going to be with Trump as President. He's also pardoned anti-choice activists who have been convicted of attacking abortion clinics and thereby signaled that they are going to get his support no matter what they do. Trump and the right-wing cabal he's embedded with in the government have things set up so that they don't have to directly tell Trump's followers that they should slander people or even physically attack them. A simple mention of something and they unleash their worst behaviors.
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Marianne Faithfull - 1946-2025 Died at the age of 78 this past week. In 1964, she was the first one to sing As Tears Go By and I liked her, not sexually since I was being exclusively homosexual at the time, but she made that song get to me. I learned the lyrics and eventually would sing the song to myself a few years later on the docks at Newport on the Saigon River. I mostly sang in my head but sometimes in the deep night I'd actually sing the song to myself out loud. I had also memorized Strawberry Fields by The Beatles and I did the same thing with that song.
As Tears Go By was the kind of song that, in my opinion, expresses something a young person can feel as they see that their childhood is really over. That can be quite a life changing realization. It's different from an older person realizing that their childhood and/or youth is gone, it's the sort of thing that a teenager can suddenly confront, and it's a bit shocking because they're so much closer to childhood.
Marianne Faithfull was Mick Jagger's girlfriend and got too heavily into drugs in the late '60s. In 1967, after Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested for drug possession and were briefly in jail Marianne Faithfull was identified in the British tabloids as the, Naked Girl At Stones Party,
an appellation that she did not like. Oh, I liked that song and so I liked her.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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